When it comes to aging, the worst thing you can do is allow yourself to lose mobility and flexibility. As a matter of fact, even though strength is critically important to maintaining function, the immobility that comes from the fast, progressive loss of range of motion in your hips, wrists, shoulders, ankles and spine can dramatically cause a decrease in quality of life.
As a physical therapist, I put together this video to highlight the basic movements that we stop doing, all of which can easily be performed on the floor with absolutely no equipment at all, which can help you to feel younger and move like you did when you’re a kid.
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We start by getting into a deep squat position.
It is critical that we maintain our body’s ability to do simple movement patterns like the deep squat. Many of us either can’t get down pain free or if we can do it we find that either our ankles lift off of the ground or we can’t get low enough because of a lack of mobility in the hips or knees. This is unacceptable.
Everyone must be able to do the things we used to do without thinking as a kid.
The reason why many of us lose the mobility and ability to do such a simple task is because we actually just stop trying to do it. Our daily lives don’t require us to go all the way down to the floor in a deep squat so we just stop doing it. Meantime, kids assume this position as a comfortable way to play and therefore do it without thought multiple times a day.
If you find that your heels lift off the ground here is what you do:
Shift your weight to one side and off of the other. From there you can actually work on leaning forward into the ankle to gradually work on restoring dorsiflexion and more ankel mobility and flexibilty of the calf muscles.
That said, simply getting down into a squat isn’t enough. You want to have dynamic flexibility as well. Here you can start working on stepping sideways, backwards or forwards – each one helping to work on more knee flexion, hip mobility or hip rotation that can start to unlock stiff joints and make you start moving better than you have in the last 20 years or more.
Each of these can be performed for just 30 seconds apiece once or twice a day. Within just 30 days you will start to feel significant improvement of your lost mobility and flexibility.
Next you want to work from a different body position – on your back – or more specifically from the reverse crab position. This is an amazing movement that helps to unlock lost shoulder mobility and lost shoulder extension range of motion. Not only that but it also is critically important for getting more wrist mobility. As we age, we lose mobility faster than we lose strength – and we lose strength at a rate of 7% per decade.
This is more of a silent killer that slips away day by day without focused attention.
Perform the reverse crab and make sure to open up the chest and try to lift your hips as high as you can during the movement. Once you do, you can then work on doing a slight shift of the body back and forth in what is called a body saw. This will further increase the stretch and range of motion of the shoulders, hips and ankles helping to restore the range that has been lost.
Finally, many people are unable to easiliy get off the floor. This is a serious situation and one that can be easily addressed by working on the inchworm exercise on a daily basis. Use it or lose it has never been more true. The inchworm teaches you the upper body strength and lower body mobility in the hamstrings and calves to get your legs in a position to easily push your body back to standing.
Make sure to keep pressing the knees backwards as you push up to work on keeping the flexibility of your legs that is easily lost from sitting all the time.
As you age, mobility and flexibility are lost at an astounding rate. All you have to do is think back to when you were in your teens or younger and remember some of the things that you used to do effortlessly that would now be a challenge for you physically. Getting on the floor is not something that we should stop doing ever. Now, with these three moves you have a reason to focus on doing the things that are going to get your body feeling younger with a minimal time investment.
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